The invention relates to a laptop portable computer (PC) having a base housing with an input keyboard, a screen and a printer arrangement.
With increasing miniaturization, some years ago it proved possible for the first time to manufacture high-performance computers as desktop devices or deskside devices so that they could be used as independent devices at the workstation of a user; such computers were called personal computers (PC). Continued development resulted in a further reduction of the dimensions and weight of personal computers, so that it was possible to accommodate them in portable cases as so-called portables. The latest development are what are called laptops; these are briefcase-format personal computers with a low weight which can be used in areas in which it has hitherto not been possible to utilize computers because they were too large and too heavy.
A severe drawback of previously known laptop computers is the fact that they have no printer, or only a very basic one. In particular, until now it has not been possible to integrate a printer that can print, for example, the current standard commercial A4 format in a laptop computer. With most laptop computers, therefore, it is only possible to connect a conventional printer, which greatly restricts the use of the computer as a mobile device.
A portable computer having a base housing with an input keyboard, a screen and a printer arrangement in which a printer is directly integrated (EPSON HX-20) is also already known. With this known device, the input keyboard, the screen and the printer arrangement are combined in a base housing, the front part of the top side of the device facing the user being occupied by the input keyboard, while a printer, a screen and a microcassette station are arranged next to one another in the rear region of the base housing. In this arrangement only approximately one third of the device width is available for each of the aforementioned components in each case. The printer used in the known laptop computer has therefore a line width of only 24 characters, so that it cannot be used for a large number of computing tasks, in particular for word processing.